A quick word on how I make my websites because my method is:
- Extremely slow,
- Very tedious,
- Not secure at all,
- Unable to share/scale,
- A huge waste of time in my life.
If you want to do the same thing, here's how.
In prehistory, I used to make static HTML / CSS sites. And it was fun. I had learned html during an internship at an internet company and I was having a lot of fun making psychedelic sites where everything moved thanks to carefully placed gifs (now I pronounce "jguif" to agree with everyone).
I should have stopped there.
Then I got into Wordpress. And let's be clear: it's very good, Wordpress. A very mature environment, a solid code base, a very active community around an open source schema with paying options for those who want them. Whatever your business, in 90% of the cases, Wordpress is a good solution.
I should have stopped there.
But when it came time to make a website for my company ChezFilms, I wanted more control. Over the aesthetics, the categories, the navigation. I started with a static html site: simple, sober, fast. Important company info, demo movies, an email address and that's it.
And that's when I messed up. I put my finger in the pie.
I thought to myself, "what if I created a tiny database to enter my movies anyway?" After all, with over 60 films under my belt, it made sense to be able to browse projects by client, by craft, by genre, etc. So I linked my site to this database in php.
But to populate this database and update it, I did need an admin console. So I programmed that, still in php: a quick and adapted way to enter movies, teams, projects. The version 1 was only for the movies. For version 2, I expanded to other types of posts: photos, articles, videos, etc.
And before I knew it, I had programmed a new Wordpress.
In much, much, much worse ways, obviously. But - I have to admit - very suitable for my needs. So that if you go to ChezFilms, it's still my code that runs the site. (The only external library I use is twig.) The console also allows you to manage invoices and quotes.
Then... I got tired of it. Since the beginning of the year, as you know, I've been taking a more content-centric than container-centric approach.
So I started over using Drupal.
It's a framework that allows you to build a site from scratch but more in depth than Wordpress. The architecture is extremely scalable so you can do whatever you want with minimal code. And there are ready-made templates. That's what I used to create this version of Boulengerie and that's what I'll use to create the next version of ChezFilms.
And then, I promise: we'll stop here.
